You Again

by Debra Jo Immergut

  It was a Bank of America branch and its window finally succumbed after my seventh blow, cracking into great shark fins of glass. The fins fell inward, cracking into a thousand spears that scattered across nubby oatmeal carpet and a single rolling chair so similar to my rolling chair at work, and I thought of my window at work, my so-called artwork that I had consoled myself with lo these many years—how many? Thirteen? Thirteen years in the rolling plastic-wheeled chair yearning for color out the big window—and now watching these spears slice through the air of that bank lobby, I felt not an ounce of yearning. I felt power.

  How life slows down at such moments.

  “No hate! No fear! Fascists are not welcome here!” I could hear the kids screaming behind me, frenzied, a joyous, alarming hysteria.

  I turned to see my son. Thrilled? Aghast? His eyes glimmered and in them I saw a face reflected—half covered, mouth, nose, and chin wrapped in a black rag. Was this pirate, this rabble-rouser, this transgressor—was that me? I couldn’t read Pete’s expression. He seemed to be attempting to chant along with the other bellowing onlookers, but when he opened his mouth to shout, no sound emerged.

  Then, across the street, a young woman, not cloaked, not shouting or waving her fist. Just watching, intently.

  Dr. Tristane Kazemy, AUGUST 31, 2016

  Abigail Willard would not leave her. She had not opened the file in a month, since her incursion into Laurin’s office. She could not risk termination. She tried to refocus on her duties in the lab, and in the evenings, on Samir, who had gradually coalesced into a boyfriend of sorts.

  Then, an email: Could she present her findings in New York by year’s end? Compare notes with the quantum physicist?

  Pursuing a physics investigation into Abigail Willard’s affliction was beyond the pale. She’d thought this all along.

  Though she’d had to set the case aside, the woman had been haunting her dreams nearly every night. No Freud necessary to explain this, of course. Mme. Willard had been sent her way as a signifier of ambitions that refused to be thwarted.

  She replied to the email. Yes, she would make the trip to New York, to present her evidence and her theories. Laurin and his lab be damned. Let him terminate her, if he must. She mused again about how her narrative seemed to flow as if directed by certain unseen forces. As if, for her life, there seemed to be greater designs.

  9/9/9/9

  ABBY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

  I undertook a penitential journey to a block-long silvery cube in far uptown Manhattan, a megastore devoted to tools for creating household order. I rose early, leaving plenty of time so I could be there, a lone supplicant, waiting, when the turbaned security guard unlocked its gates and admitted me with a solemn bow. I bought myself a brand-new broom, hefty, janitorial, aluminum with black bristles, suitable for cleaning a warship or a crematorium. With my new broom, I returned to Brooklyn and began to sweep the floors. The planks that bore my boys’ first toddles. Despite the new finish, the invisible tiny footprints serpentined all over the wood, down the hall, into the kitchen, and train tracks and bright plastic rings and blocks were still scattered across the grain.

  The men from Pinsky’s Moving and Storage arrived mid-morning, hand trucks loaded high. It was strange, how much I’d missed our things. The jumbled box of flashlights and extension cords, the blue plastic laundry basket filled with pots and pans. They held meaning and memory and comfort, these bland ingredients of family life.

  I cleaned the stairs, working my way up, step by step, pausing now and then to steady myself, leaning hard on my heavy-duty sweeper.

  All I’d wanted to do was to create, to unfurl that will and honor that gift, and lately all I’d done was destroy, and destroy, and destroy.

  Twiz saved me. She’d grabbed the sledgehammer right out of my hands, told me to run. She dodged the police, when they’d finally caught up to the Brigade’s rampage on Wall Street, but a few others spent two nights in jail and were now facing charges. I gave Pete a fat envelope, money from the insurance, that Dennis and I had earmarked for new furniture. He gave it to Dmitri, who had set up the group’s legal defense fund, with help from his mysterious parents.

  The detective might have been able to ease the jailed members’ way, if he’d been trustworthy. Apparently he was not. Still, with awful persistence, he lingered inside my head. I tried to drown the memory of his touch with lists of chores and items to buy. When his face appeared before my dreaming eyes, I swiped it away.

  Dennis and I would have to reconstitute our marriage. Or would we decide to disband the entire venture?

  I reached the top step of the steep and narrow flight, cradling the filled dustpan. Searched for a trash bin in which to empty it.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, to find her there, in the scorched bedstead in my sullied master bedroom. Asleep. Sunlight sifting through her hair to find the gold bits, catching the sheen on the dirty mattress. I’d ordered a new queen-sized the day after my tryst there, and it leaned against a wall downstairs, plastic-wrapped, a new set of sheets in a bag beside it.

  The drawer of the bedside table was open. Had she gotten into my sleeping pills? Please, no.

  I grabbed the bottle, and it rattled, still mostly full. No, then. She simply needed rest.

  Her legs were bare, tan from summer, her heels calloused. The tenderness I felt, standing over her. This wayward being. It was like seeing a wild bird trapped in my room. How had she gained entry? Maybe she’d slipped in during all those comings and goings, electricians and carpenters, the doors flung open wide to let floor varnish air and dry.

  I listen to her breathe. Could I hear her breathe? Or is that me.

  She opens her eyes then. Tears leak out of the corners.

  We are in a bad place, she says. Her voice sounds scratchy, an old recording.

  I know.

  I didn’t sleep for two whole nights, she says. Finally I ran. I ended up here.

  She raises herself on her elbows, looks around at the modest room—the small fireplace defunct since the days of coal, the closet yawning open, emptied of our smoke-stinking clothes. My easel. Her eyes stop on my latest work, viridian with ash worked into the oils. She stares at it a long moment, appraising. I hold my breath.

  I wish I could paint like that, she finally whispers.

  I feel relief, a coolness washing through me.

  She turns to me. Her face so round and vaguely there, a moon in daylight.

  You will, I say.

  No. This thing is going to kill me. He is going to kill me. You should see what we’ve been up to.

  I did see.

  She smiles, sadly. So you say.

  He dies at your hands.

  And as these strange, stiff syllables leave my mouth, I want only to take them back. The shock of them. The shock in my body, and in her eyes.

  Why did my lips and tongue offer up those words?

  The blast wave of this idea, the stricken look on her face, push me backward. I am stumbling, backward, away from her, out the bedroom door, but there really isn’t room to back away, in that slot-like vertiginous house. And me already unsteady as it goes.

  The floor disappears under my feet and my brain registers that I have stepped into the open air at the head of the staircase, I am hurtling, windmilling, backward and down.

  As I fly, a thought: I already know how this feels.

  How long did I lie at the bottom, in a pile? It was Dennis who found me, fresh from the airport. With Benjamin in tow.

  The summer had come to its end.

  SESSION NOTES

  * * *

  A back in treatment. Abusing substances. In terrible struggles with the young man in her life.

  But more than that. She says she has split into two somehow. Acute schizophrenia? A difficult diagnosis but one I perhaps need to consider.

  She seems so unstable, I fear I might not see her here again, though she assured me I most definitely would.

  ABBY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2015


  “It’s called ‘Stallion,’ Ma. This is the color.” Benjamin held aloft a swatch. His room would be the final painting job, and he wanted it black. At the hardware store, Dennis and I argued against it, but in the end, we acquiesced. School was about to begin. Benjamin would be in the tenth grade and, stunningly, Pete in twelfth. There was so much to attend to. Let the boy paint his room black.

  Gianna was with us, just two days back from her summer job in Los Angeles, where she served coffee to many movie stars while interning at a wellness center. As we waited for the paint to emerge from the jiggling mixing machine, she ran through a long list of celebrities major and minor, who got the hot stones, who got reiki, and who had bad toenails. I hung on her every word.

  After Dennis found me in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, he told Benjamin to call 911, but, in a state of semi-awareness, I urged him not to. I’m fine, I insisted. Thinking of course what emergency care might cost. In the meantime, the movers were still building a city of boxes. Dennis stood over me, pondering for a minute, running a hand through his hair, which was yellow again from the salt and sun of his homeland. Then he declared, “Screw Dr. Singh. We need an upgrade,” and he maneuvered his phone out of his pocket. “Mariah will know someone.”

  “I have a shrink appointment tomorrow,” I said, rubbing my temples, which seemed to be sinkholes, pressing inward.

  “You think this is all in your head?” he said with the phone at his ear. “I don’t.”

  He left a message asking Mariah to call him. Then I realized he was dragging his suitcase up the stairs, and I had a frightening thought—was she still up there?

  But all he said was “Oh, shit, we need to replace this ruined mattress.”

  Yes, I ordered it, it’s here. New sheets too. I tried to tell him but my vocal cords produced only a strangled whisper.

  Later that night, with both of us settled atop the fresh bedding, I reached toward the nightstand, looking for the relief of my insomnia meds. I felt an unfamiliar shape instead. It was a small silver matchbox. Printed with one word: Mobius. Yes. That was the name of the club, the nightclub of the collapsed umbrella, the running boy and the raspberry coat. The night I lost my taxi. Mobius offered little boxes of matches, in those long-ago days of cigarettes.

  I slid it open. Inside, no matches. Instead, a chip of pinkish-beige paint.

  ABBY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

  Had Dr. Merle Unzicker wizened even more, summering? Her eyes seemed a bit more squinted and sunken, her nose more protuberant. I sat on the sagging sofa, across from her wheelchair. Dr. Merle regarded me from somewhere inside her wrinkles. Her head bobbed. I interpreted that as a signal to speak.

  “I’ve taken some big steps.” I chuckled, nervous. “Or mis-steps?”

  “Yes?” Her voice was clipped, quiet.

  “The first thing I did when I moved back into my house was fall down the stairs.”

  She emitted a small grunt. “Oh dear.”

  “And I’ve been getting into activism,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “My son Pete led me to it. A political movement, in a way. I am finding it interesting,” I said.

  “An optimistic act,” she said.

  “I suppose so,” I shrugged.

  “And your work? Your art?”

  “I’ve been painting in the ashes. With the ashes.”

  Dr. Merle cocked her white-fuzzed head to one side, just a few degrees, like an ancient, inquisitive poodle, her eyes in a squint, almost closed.

  “But there’s this other person, this girl . . . who is . . . troubling me.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I know.” She faintly cleared her throat. I sensed she was about to spit out a pearl of wisdom. I sat up on the couch, hands on my knees, waiting.

  Waiting.

  And waiting.

  Was she asleep?

  I peered at her for a long time. It seemed like a long time anyhow. I could hear her gently rattling breath and the hum and thump of blow-dryers and disco music.

  Dr. Merle had, seemingly, fallen asleep. Her feet folded in on themselves, like little fronds.

  I stood up and began to tiptoe out of the room. “You have been given a gift,” she said as I moved past her chair. “You must use it.”

  I froze. “Oh. Yes.” I looked down, right down to the top of her head, the scalp more like membrane than skin. “My art, my painting? I should use that gift?” I stuttered.

  She let out a strange impatient sigh. “No. No. Not that.” Her head moved again, the mildest shake. “A much more vital gift.” The veins on her skull throbbed slowly. “The chance to know yourself.”

  Blue rivulets on snow-white ground. Pulsating.

  “To love yourself.”

  She dismissed me with a wave of her gnarled hand. “I will bill you,” she said.

  September 10, 2016

  * * *

  From: GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu

  To: J. Leverett@deepxmail.com

  It’s been 16 years since I was in NYC, since my divorce and departure from Columbia. I’ll aim for a collegial atmosphere with the Canadian brain doc—just hope she’ll come with an open mind and be ready to have it blown.

  ABBY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

  From Mariah’s climate-controlled storage sanctum in the Bronx, a team of brawny balletic art handlers delivered nearly a hundred paintings to the carriage house. We watched as they carried them up to the studio and, when they ran out of room there, propped them downstairs in the living room, on the sofas and on the eighteen chairs that surrounded the dining table. She’d asked me to come help, to brainstorm with her on new frames and weigh in on curatorial choices for the inaugural show at the Jillian Broder Space, to open next spring in a Civil War–era warehouse overlooking the East River. It would be the biggest gallery the city had ever seen.

  Mariah handed me a wine globe brimming with green-gold fizz. “Made with grapes from the family land on Crete,” she said. “Kind of prickly and tarty and sweet. Like you,” she laughed. We clinked glasses, then I wandered, contemplating the patterns and progressions, the incontrovertible evidence of her genius and energy, of her productivity and her aspirations and her ambition. Two decades of dauntless work. She wanted to reframe it all. It would cost a fortune.

  I lingered over the spiral series, carmines and crimsons and titanium whites, laid out on the floor under the sunny windows. Laid flat, with the bright rays glancing over them, the textured brushstrokes rippled and roiled like the surface of a pot just about to burst into full boil.

  Mariah joined me there, gazing. “I have a favor to ask you,” she said. “It’s Jillian’s sixtieth birthday at the end of the month, and I felt obliged to throw her a bash.” She turned to me, and for the first time I could recall, she looked embarrassed. “Would you and Dennis be there as my dates? Poor Hyde, he’s been texting me photos of his penis, as if that would lure me back.” She showed me one. It made me very sad, this mottled pink offering, springing hopefully from a general hairy darkness. She told me she knew the end was near when he tried to prescribe a diet that would melt her belly fat. “I realized I was fonder of my belly fat than I was of him,” she said.

  She chuckled down at her phone, but when she met my gaze again, I saw vulnerability there. Though the notion of celebrating Jillian Broder—if I had a bête noire, she was it—made my belly fat clench, I would do this for Mariah.

  We stood gazing at her spirals, and we talked a bit more about her show, and about Matthew Legge-Lewis, and his overtures to me. “I can’t wait to go to your vernissage,” she said. “Soon enough you’ll be outgunning me.” She reminded me of the time in school when she and I showed work together in a critique session, and the class clearly preferred mine over hers. After that, she said, “I made sure never to be in the same class with you again. I would go to the registrar and sneak a peek at your course load, just to be sure we didn’t end up together.” She shook her head at the memory. “Bremer actually told me I
should study your brush technique.”

  Envy is twinned with admiration, and admiration is often suffused with love. As the two of us shuffled her work around the room, millions of dollars’ worth of pigment and fabric, pairing this painting with that print, marking frames that would be replaced, I realized that love was now the strongest current that ran between us. I loved her, and this was the key reality. The other, the alternate Mariah reality—what was happening or had happened with Dennis—could play out beyond the wall of my perception. I would not try to establish its dimensions, trace its outlines. I would not delve.

  I write this now and I realize how bizarre, how unnatural even, this position is or was. But not all things in love can be explained. In fact, most things in love cannot be explained.

  I stared up at the portrait of her mustachioed progenitor. “I like the family wine,” I said.

  “He would’ve liked you,” she said. “Eye for the ladies.”

  “I’m probably a bit to the left of his comfort zone, lately,” I said.

  “Yes, that reminds me.” She opened a closet and pulled out a bag of placards. “You forgot this when you moved out.” She lifted one. “No Pasaran.” Smiled up at me. She handed me the bag. “You just keep on fighting the good fight, babe. That is exactly what makes you who you are.”

  ABBY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2015

  “Missus, nice to see you.”

  “Abby,” I said. “Just call me Abby.”

  “And how are you, friend.” Milo Petimezas peered into the car at Pete.

  “Hmm. OK,” Pete stammered. The guy made him nervous and I did not blame him one bit.

  “Dmitri will be out,” he said. “He is probably fixing his hair.” He grinned at me through his beard, stiff hair gleaming in the steady rain. “You going bowling, then?” I guess this is what his brother had told him.