Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

William remembered how Irene and her friends had made fun of the “so-called art” at the Christmas party the night they met. He wondered if, to someone else, the moldy yam had meant as much as all this did to him. Maybe. But he wanted to believe that there was something here that would carry these feckless people inside Irene’s heart and guts. That it would be — how had Jacob put it? — metamorphic. Not just fucking television.

There was a crowd around Ms. Daphne , a painting of a transvestite reclining on a waterbed à la Modigliani, with startlingly hideous wallpaper in the background. This hung beside Man in Crooked Necktie, a portrait of George in a suit, holding a vanilla cupcake in one hand. And of course William recognized his Christmas gift to her (formerly his own Christmas gift to his mother), now unraveled and carefully molded into the stunning Kimono Cocoon .

Certainly the most popular piece in the show was the I-beam from the World Trade Center. The Iron Queen . She had done nothing whatsoever to the steel itself, leaving every bit of rust and dirt that had accumulated along its length, but through some alchemy William didn’t quite understand, she had affixed seventy-seven nude Barbie dolls to it. Beige plastic crawled, climbed, and sprawled all across the girder, in places so twisted up on top of one another that you could barely see the metal underneath. Something about seeing that same, painted-on smile over and over was tremendously unsettling. From certain angles William thought it was some kind of Elysian orgy. From others it seemed like a hellscape worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. This had been, apparently, the piece that she’d been sneaking off to work on at the gallery right up to her collapse at the museum last summer. As far as he, or anyone, seemed to be able to tell, it was finished. Every strand of fake hair harmoniously and horribly in place.

William kept thinking about that last day. The day before the end. She had been pretty drugged-up. But she had asked about the birdcage. And she had tried to say something else after that, but it hadn’t been clear — these, her last words to him. He told himself that they had just been nonsense, pointless pain-killer koans. But he couldn’t shake the thought that maybe she had been asking him to do something for her. He wasn’t sure at first, but the more he’d thought about it, he was convinced that she’d said the words “Tell my father.” William had been thinking of how to find him, and now he had finally come up with an idea.

William looked up as Sara called the crowd over to Patient R5691414510 so that she and Juliette and Abeba could thank them all for coming. He had quietly headed the other way, toward the “piece” that he had been eyeing all night. Jewelry Box, Bird Cage . It was hanging in the corner exactly as it had hung in Irene’s apartment. Had she intended it to be sold as a piece of art? Unclear, and possibly irrelevant. As Sara began to retell a story about meeting Irene while they’d been interns at the university press (Sara had been charged with finding out if Irene was stealing toner — she was), William got up on his tiptoes and reached his slender fingers toward the thin bars of the birdcage. This time he found the hidden door that he’d seen Irene open to retrieve a necklace before leaving for William’s apartment. He opened the cage and grabbed the little black address book that he’d first seen there more than two years earlier. Then he’d shoved it into his breast pocket and stepped out into the night, where, after lighting the other half of the joint, he’d caught sight of the bridge.

He knew the fastest way home was on the subway. But instead he trudged up the icy lanes to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and thought back to the morning, a year ago, when he’d left Irene’s hospital room. Typical William. Early exit. He just couldn’t handle the very end. He’d needed to walk up that corridor toward the elevators knowing she was still alive. Out on the street, and later on the bus, he hadn’t been sure one way or the other. By the time he got back to his apartment, he reasoned that it was probably over. But he still didn’t know. He’d felt so numb and yet not nearly numb enough.

That was when he’d dug out the shoebox where she’d been keeping the last half ounce of Northern Lights premium indica that she’d bought from Skeevo. He’d never tried it before, but now he did, in the same careful way she’d taught him to roll it for her. With each hour that passed, he figured the likelihood was a little less that she was still alive. The probability approached zero, but even the next day and the day after, it didn’t reach the asymptote. It felt instead like those months when they’d been broken up. Weeks went by, and then months. In the rational gray matter of his brain, William knew she was gone, but there was no convincing the irrational spaces inside it. Little sparks flew from synapse to synapse carrying the words She Is Dead across the gaps that kept insisting She Is Here .

The pathway over the bridge was steeped in soft tea-brown light. He felt Irene as a gambler feels his luck at a certain seat at the table. The way a sculptor feels something besides her own will moving her hands. It was like seeing out of a second set of eyes and hearing with another pair of ears. Walking a hundred feet above the water, between two worlds that were also one. He didn’t know how else to describe it, except to say it felt as if she were walking just behind him.

2

At eight the next morning, he stood in front of a glass wall, the smell of fresh bread coming from the bakery behind him. He stared out at the traffic circumnavigating Columbus Circle, from inside the Time Warner Center. He’d spent half the night at a back table at Veselka, studying the address book, where he’d found Skeevo’s number scribbled down and had sent him a text message: Hi, this is William Cho, Irene’s friend. We met in Staten Island that day. To his amazement, there had been a reply after only moments. Cool. How are you? And after a few quick pleasantries they had agreed to meet the following morning at the bakery, where Skeevo was washing dishes part time and learning the mysterious art of bread making. William hadn’t seen much point in going home, and he’d been afraid to sleep, for fear he’d wake up and find the feeling had gone. He’d spent the rest of the night wandering around, and it had left him with quite an appetite, so he was glad to see Skeevo bring over a few fresh loaves of something called pan de horno , which was heavenly.

“People think it’s all about the starters, or the yeast,” Skeevo explained. “But just as with a lot of things, there’s an art to it. You form a relationship with the dough as you knead it. Too much or too little, and you get flat, dead crap. Not enough air in there. It’s a living thing, bread.”

Steam rose off the bread as William ripped into it. Light glinted off the ever-rising escalator steps. A red sunburst of fabric was being hung in the window of a store across the way. He kept thinking he might see Irene stepping out of the entrance to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, on the arm of some man in a better suit than he’d ever own.

Skeevo wore an ADVENTURE TIME T-shirt, ripped jeans, and a pair of sneakers with silhouettes of Questlove on the tongues. His cheeks were reddish and rough.

“I guess you heard what happened with Irene,” Skeevo said.

William nodded. “I was with her at the hospital when it happened,” he lied.

Skeevo didn’t say anything but sipped his double espresso and scratched his cheek.

“How did you hear?” William asked.

“Facebook,” Skeevo replied. “Fucking shame.”