Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

“It’s been a long stretch.”

“A very long time indeed.” Claire smiled vaguely. She had been rehearsing this lie of recognition for a year now with strangers on the street. Just because they were strangers to her did not mean she was a stranger to them, which was difficult to reconcile. She was a terrible liar, but she always had a few vague phrases at the ready. Luckily, she had very few friends left whom she could insult with her forgetfulness. “A very long time,” Claire said.

“I’ve thought about you,” the man said, examining a speck on the wall beside him with great scrutiny. “I never forgot.” He scratched at the speck with his fingernail.

“Well, neither have I.”

“How could I?” He searched her face, and she didn’t know what to put on it for him. Had they been lovers? He was much younger, but she wouldn’t put it past herself. She closed her eyes and sucked in her bottom lip, searching in that black pit of memory — it was like groping with the claw in those toy machines children fed quarters to in grocery-store entranceways. They never got the toy. The searching was painful, physically. She felt the tears only when they were nearing her chin, and her face grew terribly hot. She wanted to cry and to sleep. She wanted this man to leave her alone and to stop demanding memory from her like she was a soap dispenser. She opened her eyes.

He was looking at her with such horror you’d think she’d dropped dead at his feet.

“They’re just tears,” she said angrily. “It’s nothing to do with you. I have a condition.”

Ever since she went to the doctor with the first signs, she’d been a wreck. As if her diagnosis had added another symptom to the catalog: lachrymation, as her doctor referred to it. Once again she was reading about her own condition and future ailments in textbooks; once again she was her own favorite subject. Not that she needed to study up, having witnessed her mother’s descent. And it was a descent — a plummeting, a gaining of momentum down the rabbit hole that did not end with anything quite so magical as Wonderland, but did contain the ringing words, “Off with her head.”

“Oh, that’s, okay, good. Good.” The man laughed awkwardly. “Could we talk for a while? I’ll walk you upstairs. Do you live upstairs?”

“I was about to check my mail.” She looked downstairs toward the mail slots. But she was too exhausted; it didn’t matter what order it happened in. “2L.” She gestured up.

“Let me take care of that crate. I’ll be back in a flash. Supplies, you know? Extermination chemicals and stuff. Vince over there will take it to headquarters. They won’t miss me. Vince, let’s get this thing in the van, what are you wasting time for?”

Vince jogged back up to the crate. She watched them converse for a moment in angry whispers, Vince saying he wasn’t getting paid enough for this bullshit and you better get another customer out of this. Both of them grimaced some more and that was that. Claire flattened herself along the wall as they passed with the crate and went outside.

In the gloomy watercolor, the tornado seemed to have moved closer to the foreground.

Was she supposed to wait for him? She needed to sit and rest and hide from the man. She could go up to her apartment and shut the door and pretend she didn’t hear him knocking. But it would be nice to be helped up the stairs.

She stayed as she was, pinned against the wall for what seemed like many minutes, still as a statue. If he didn’t hurry up she might become one. What kind of statue would she become? Something Victorian, both arms intact. Revered by tourists and cleaned when shat upon. To be a monument to a war would be nice enough, if it was the right war. Or to be trapped behind the eyes of a Madonna figure. What a hoot it would be to have people pray at her sandaled, limestone feet.

At the bottom of the stairs, the too-bright sun adhered itself to the man’s face like a jellyfish, and Claire had to look away. Her eyes were terribly sensitive lately. He walked up to the landing, darker now, carrying his gas mask under his arm — just in case, she supposed. He smiled softly. Her feet felt frighteningly light with him fairly lifting her up the stairs, as if her arms were handles and her body a worn grocery bag, too many holes and leaks to count.

As they made their way slowly up the last steps, he muttered her name and soft phrases about how good it was to see her. Claire let him go on. And why shouldn’t she allow someone to regard her with joy even if she didn’t know this man from Adam. It gave her a small thrill, though it felt rotten to lie to such a kind person.

“And in the same neighborhood, no less,” he went on. “Just down the block. Do you miss it? Your old apartment? You should think about getting a ground-floor place, not that it’s my business. So you don’t have to walk up the stairs by yourself.” He shook his head. “You remember what a mess we made of the den? Me and the guys sleeping on the floor.”

“Yes. Unbelievable,” she agreed emphatically.

“All these years,” he mumbled.

“Yes, it has been years, I was going to say that. You took the words plumb out of my mouth.” She wondered if she’d known him before or after Mary passed.

He laughed again at something she didn’t catch. What a nice man, with a nice laugh, who had apparently slept on her floor? With other men? Claire found that hard to believe, but she often felt like she’d been cast at the end of a play, an understudy to the real actress who’d been reported suddenly missing, and she hadn’t had the chance to read the script and catch up with the other players. At other times, she was aware of the prior scenes, having watched the first three acts from the wings before being thrust on stage, the script ripped from her trembling fingers — but she was never the original actor.

“I loved that apartment,” the man was saying. “Even after…”

They had reached her door. Claire dug into the pockets of her long purple cardigan for her key ring. “And I enjoyed having you there, of course. Those were good times,” Claire said. She thought herself very convincing. She was about to lift her key to the lock, but then the man stepped between her and the door. He peered too closely at her face, frowning, wrinkling up his forehead. Then he leaned back and let out a quick, cold laugh.

“What is it? Let me by,” she said.

“As soon as you’re honest with me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come on, you don’t remember me. Do you? You don’t remember a thing.”

“Don’t take it personally. My mind’s not quite what it used to be. The condition.”

“The condition. And what would that be?”

“A memory condition.”

“Oh.” He hesitated and stepped aside.

Claire fumbled with the keyring enough that he steadied her hand, sorted through the half-dozen keys, and lifted out the correct one.

“How did you know?” Claire demanded.

But he only held the key out to her.

“I can do it,” she said curtly. He let her. And as she opened the door to her apartment, she knew all at once. She was not walking into her shameful one-room box of mold, the only place she could afford in the neighborhood — she was walking into her and Freddie’s old hallway, sans Freddie, those beautiful white moldings around the doorframes, the den with the double doors and sleeping bags spread across the carpet where Jill and the boys were snoring well past noon.

“Jill,” she whispered. She turned to him in the doorway and dropped her keys at his feet, but did not bend down to pick them up. The door banged open against the adjacent wall, where there was a dent the shape of a knob that deepened each time she came home.