Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  The nurse looked doubtful. “Well, we have it on video here. I don’t see why you have to take her out on a day like today. Besides, I really think that she doesn’t like A Bug’s Life. Bugs, even animated bugs, scare June terribly.”

  I thought then that it might not work, that I might have to leave June out of my plans for that day. Especially when the nurse turned to June and looked questioningly into her hood.

  “Is this true?” she asked June. “ Do you want to go see A Bug’s Life with your brother?”

  June surprised us both by moving her great Eskimo head up and down. The nurse wouldn’t give up, though. I have to say one thing: they are very protective of their charges at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope. “But don’t bugs scare you, June? Aren’t you afraid you’ll come back and have nightmares about the bugs?”

  I thought for sure this would be it. June was scared of bugs. Terrified of them, actually, and I could have kicked myself for telling such a stupid lie. I could have told the nurse we were going bowling, or to see a rerun of The Lion King for the eightieth time. Instead I had to pick A Bug’s Life. Here June was, faced with such a scary question, about to go screaming down through the hallways bundled up in a blue parka and give one of the maintenance men a heart attack. Instead, she shook her head firmly from side to side.

  “I wanna go see A Bug’s Life with Bubby,” she said.

  I could have kissed her. The nurse, satisfied, went back behind the desk and told me to have June home for dinner at five. She told June that she better not get nightmares from the movie, because no one wanted to be sitting up with her all night if she did. Outside, June started giggling. “We told Ms. Lizzy a fib,” said June. “We told a fib, Bubby. A Bug’s Life. Ha!”

  I practically had to drag June to the bus stop she was laughing so hard. Suddenly she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and a teenager almost bumped into her. “Watch where you’re going, fat ass!” he said.

  I gave the kid a dirty look, but June ignored him. “We told Ms. Lizzy a fib,” she said. “Didn’t we, Bubby?”

  “Yes, June,” I said. “We did.” For a minute, I thought the implications of what we had done were dawning on June. I mean, I had the mind of an adult, lying came as easily to me as watching television. For June, however, it was a different thing. They were taught not to lie at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope. The city might have taken over the institution with one set of values, but the defunct sisters had left their values firm and intact on the Down’s syndrome wing. No lying. I was starting to feel guilty again. June said, “We’re not seeing A Bug’s Life?”

  “No, June,” I said. “But if you’re worried about the fib, we can go back to the house. We don’t have to tell a fib if you don’t want to.”

  June shook her nose again, this time even more adamantly than before. “As long as we told a fib. I don’t want to see A Bug’s Life. June’s afraid of bugs.”

  I assured June that we were indeed not going to see A Bug’s Life. Even through the excesses of her parka I could see the full weight of her smile, or feel it. It carried its own warmth, its own set of values. Values that those of us who had grown up had forgotten and would probably never remember again.

  CXVII

  The reason I wanted to take June to the Modern Art Museum was simple. I wanted her to see The Hand of Judas. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I thought that somewhere buried deep down inside that simple mind was another mind as developed and capable as my own. Maybe I thought that the power of simile and metaphor was so strong that it could set off a sympathetic vibration even in those who didn’t think all that well. That June would somehow be moved enough to speak to me about how she saw the world, and about what she remembered. The fact was, I didn’t think much about it at all. I just acted on some vibration of my own. Iroquois Pete’s words often echoed in me, though I had thrown his letter away. He was right. I was acting crazier and crazier all the time. Getting smaller and smaller. Dragging around some retarded girl I didn’t know. Writing stories about a drug addict I hardly knew and poring over his case files every day for more ideas. Spying on my upstairs neighbour so I could tell his bitch of a sister whether or not he was taking his medications and going to chemotherapy.

  Giddy-up.

  CXVIII

  But none of that seemed very important then. What was important, at least to me, was the way I had planned out my day with June and the way that day didn’t happen. I thought we would go into the museum, head right for The Hand of Judas, then leave again, maybe go to BIG BAD HAMBURGERS and ruin her cafeteria dinner. What I didn’t expect was that June would turn out to be a fan of modern art. Obviously not in that pseudo-intellectual Warhol-Basquiat way, but she was fascinated by some of the pieces. She even liked the Pollocks, which gave me a mean glow of self-righteous satisfaction that could sustain me through any number of modern dance interpretations, had I the inclination to go. She oohed and ahhed over the colours, laughed at some of the wackier, gaudier sculptures, and went absolutely apeshit over Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup. June loved Campbell’s soup, especially tomato.

  “Look Bubby,” she cried. “Tomato soup! Tomato soup!”

  “Andy Warhol! Andy Warhol!” I echoed, and the museumgoers around us smiled appreciatively. Funny how June stuck out like a hammered thumb at Walt Disney movies but fit in perfectly at the Modern Art Museum.

  Anyway.

  It took me about an hour to get June past the pop and op artists, the surrealists and abstract expressionists, and into the little side room off the hallway that contained what I had really brought her to see. I knew it would be there. It had been there since I was thirteen. If there was someone in the room admiring The Hand of Judas my policy was to wait until they moved on before I entered. I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t want some amateur art critic’s version of what it meant to him or her interfering with my own. No mixing interpretations, I guess you could say.

  My sense of identity, intellectual and emotional, has always been weak. Most of my ideas are not entirely original. They are more like a composite of every idea I’ve ever read or heard. I’m not a particularly original writer either. Whenever I read something I’ve written that I really like, I find ideas stolen from all kinds of sources, liberally sprinkled with my own experience. This used to bother me, until I realized that most people’s ideas are like that.

  “The only way to become original is to be born original,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Amen to that, brother, and give my regards to Walt Disney, the shameless old plagiarist.

  “The only way a human being can waste his life,” say the wise old scribes at the Salvation Army Treatment Centre, “is to spend it wishing he is something that he is not.”

  Amen to that, too. And as June might say, if she were smart enough to know what I meant, “Get over it, Bubby.”

  Fortunately there was no one else in the Judas room. Even the hallway was empty — long and quiet and glowing with a ghostly lambency from the blue pot lights sunk deep into the ceilings and walls. The tiles covering one wall of the hallway fascinated June. We ran our open hands along them as we walked, feeling their glazed roughness on the tips of our outstretched fingers. A plaque informed us that:

  The art of tile-making was epitomized by the Iznik artisans of the Ottoman period. These tiles are an exact imitation of the Iznik tiles in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, built by the twelfth-century Sultan Ahmet in an attempt to outshine the tenth-century Emperor Justinian and his mosque across the street, the Aya Sophia, or the Red Mosque.

  Greek to me. Greek to June too. She just liked the feel and look of them. So did I.

  CXIX

  June wouldn’t go into the Judas room at first. She wanted to stay outside and rub her fingers over the Blue Mosque Iznik tiles. “They’re pretty, Bubby,” she said to me. “Aren’t they pretty?”

  “Yes, June. They’re pretty. But I want to show you something.”

  June was stubborn. Down’s syndrome patients can be frustratingly stubborn sometime
s. I took June by the elbow and tried to steer her away from the tiles and off into the side room that contained the sculpture. She pulled away from me. “No, Bubby!” she cried. “I want to look at the pretty things!”

  I was getting impatient. Any minute some bespectacled arts student was going to come along, go into my room, tell me why realism in sculpture — even metaphorical realism — didn’t work any longer and destroy my hard-won originality forever. He’d tell me to go see Jackson Pollock if I really wanted to see the archetypal cycles of betrayal and the betrayed.

  He’d tell me, if I wanted real art, to go see Campbell’s Soup.

  I got June away from the tiles in the only way I could think of. It was a dirty trick, I admit. But a dirty trick that works is still better, in my book, than a clean, ineffective one. “Fuck, June,” I said. “Come on, will you?”

  It was incredible, really incredible, to see how that word both galvanized and deflated her. Her shoulders sagged under the blue parka and she dropped her chin to her chest like someone under a spell. “Bubby said a bad word,” she mumbled sadly, staring vacantly at her own covered breasts. “Bubby said a bad word.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And I’ll say another one if you don’t come and see what I want to show you.”

  June went, with all the tragicomic grace and hilarious self-pity of one of the Three Stooges — Curly probably — being led to the gallows for a crime he didn’t commit. She kept her head lowered and shuffled along behind me. She didn’t even look up when I led her to the sculpture. Even when I stood aside and let her take my place directly in front of the pointing finger, even when I shoved her into my place, she wouldn’t look up.

  “Bubby said a bad word.”

  “Fuck, June. Look at it will you? This is what I came to show you.”

  Slowly, and with great effort, she lifted her eyes to The Hand of Judas. I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t think about it.

  June’s eyes widened, and that quickly I saw that my transgression was forgiven. Or forgotten. Whichever. I stopped breathing when I saw the recognition dawn on June’s face. Not of Judas, or Jesus, or his disciples. June couldn’t count higher than five. To June everything after five was just “a bunch.” She had no idea how many hands there were, but I knew that she got something of it. The pointing finger, and all those hands below meant something to her, even if she couldn’t explain it.

  My theory was right.

  Guilt and redemption are things we all feel, that are built into us, no matter how much we intellectualize or what we did to deserve it. This is what I thought when I saw June react to The Hand of Judas.

  For about one second.

  And then Darrel’s retarded sister did something that destroyed my original theory far more effectively than any art school graduate’s weak-as-water Art and Theory 101 regurgitations could have. She reached out to touch the pointing hand. I reached out to stop her, assuming that the exhibit was alarmed. I thought they all were, and that ten security guards would be in here with billy clubs and handcuffs quicker than you could say Jack the Dripper.

  I was wrong. The Hand of Judas wasn’t rigged with an alarm. June placed her hand directly on the plaster of Paris hand of Judas, turned her head, and smiled at me without incident. Without incident of sound. There was plenty of internal incident. There was plenty going on inside me. I could not take my eyes off June’s hand. June’s hands were big for a girl. With her open hand splayed across the hand of Judas, she covered it completely. The pointing index finger had all but disappeared inside the cuff of her jacket. June was looking at me and smiling brightly, a little girl in a woman’s body.

  When old theories die, new ones always spring up in their place. We humans have to have theories about things. We just have to know, or think we know, or we can’t sleep at night. This was the theory that sprang up the in place of my inherent guilt and redemption theory, permanently disproved by the tactile philosopher June Greene one Friday afternoon in May at the Modern Art Museum.

  That some of us are exempt from guilt. That June, and people like June, have no need of redemption or guilt because they have never in their lives knowingly betrayed anyone. Betraying someone unknowingly, according to this new theory of mine, is like never having betrayed anyone at all. June, however she saw the world, did not see it as an endless series of betrayals, did not, like most of us, divide everyone into categories of betrayer and betrayed.

  How could you not admire guts like that, even if they did come from a retard like June?

  CXX

  Meanwhile, back at the Cocaine Corral, things weren’t going so well. First of all, I was getting to the point at which I didn’t care about my work any longer. Suddenly I was more willing to break rules I used to think were sacred. If the guys fought on the floor, I let them fight. Guys told me things and I didn’t even bother to record them in the log. After Darrel and Pete, I was not so keen on recording every conversation and dry fart for the counsellors to read and talk to their clients about in the morning. I even undertook small rebellions. On piss night I put a drop of vinegar in all twenty-odd samples. It had been miserable and raining and wet outside all that week, and I wasn’t about to see some addict, even if he was using, sleeping out on the street and getting pneumonia. We were going to have a short but much-needed period of amnesty at the Salvation Army Treatment Centre, courtesy of Little Orphan Annie.

  The counsellors knew something was up. Not a week went by that somebody wasn’t caught using something. But naturally they assumed the guys had discovered some new trick to beat them. They had a meeting about it the very afternoon I was off gallivanting around the Modern Art Museum with Darrel’s sister. I didn’t care. I had even been thinking of quitting my job at the centre, though God knows where I would come up with the money to live if I did that. But I was tired of watch-dogging, especially since many of those guys I was watching had been watch-dogged all their lives and certainly didn’t need more of it. Hell, I was tired of addicts.

  CXXI

  Second of all, although maybe it seems unimportant to those of you who don’t waste your days making up stories, my fountain of inspiration dried up. I got up one morning, went to the computer with my Maxwell House, and when I put my fingers on the keyboard nothing happened. Every other morning for the past six months I would have been writing like mad before I was even fully awake. But that morning — nothing, nada, zip. I tried to think of a new Darrel story to write — Darrel at summer church camp (revelation); Darrel at school (degradation); Darrel on his first day in the big city (escapism). But I had written all these stories and there were none left to tell. Juxta lay purring between my rubber boots and looked up at me, waiting for me to begin.

  We were both to be disappointed that day. By the time Dean started practicing at one o’clock I had been sitting in front of the computer for three hours and all I had written was: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers and Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair, Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he? Hardly Hamlet. So I shut the computer down for the day and went where all writers go when they can’t write: the BIG BAD BOOKS writers’ group.

  Dagnia was surprised to see me. I hadn’t been there in ages. I was surprised to see her; I thought that she had only come there to convince me to spy on her brother.

  “I like the group,” she said, shrugging. “It gives me a purpose in life to discourage all these hacks from continuing their pathetic careers. Besides, I get more respect as a novelist than a night-school teacher.”

  “Do you read?” I asked. “What do you read?”

  She told me she went through old literary magazines in the library and found well-written stories to read to the group, stories that no one, she hoped, would ever recognize. It seems Julie’s source of inspiration had dried up too. She had read everything to the group that Dagnia Daley had ever written, including portions of the novels, which were titled Fly by Night and Destined to Deliver. (The first is about a radical-feminist lesbian vampire and the se
cond a racist politician.)

  Julie did seem kind of glad to see me, even though she wasn’t in the best of moods. I had been spying on her brother for months, though in truth it wasn’t that difficult. I kind of liked him, and I did think he was sexy as hell. He still came down just about every afternoon for coffee and to bum cigarettes. (He was one of those people who smoked only socially. He never smoked alone in his apartment and only lit up when he was around smokers like me. Guys like him never have their own cigarettes.) Sometimes, on my nights off, Dean invited me up to his apartment and played the piano for me. I had been listening to him so long I knew his repertoire and chose my favourites from my mental set list. Sometimes we would go out for dinner — gourmet pizza joints only, no salad bars. Other times Dean would buy a couple of bottles of wine and we would get drunk and play chess. He was damn near as good a chess player as he was a pianist.

  “It’s the black-and-white ivory thing,” he said. “I’ve got that part of life nailed down, I guess.”

  He always beat the pants off me. (Well, not literally. Despite Dagnia’s assurances, Dean had made no move toward my pants or anything else, though in truth I had not thought until now of proposing a game of strip-chess to him. Every time you lose a piece you have to remove a piece of clothing. I’d be naked in front of him before you could say Searching for Bobby Fischer.) During all of this I had not once heard Dean mention taking a pill or going to the hospital, nor had I seen him do anything to indicate that he was undergoing any kind of cancer treatment. Yet he didn’t look any the worse for it. He was healthy looking — robust, handsome, energetic — and there certainly wasn’t anything wrong with his supposedly deteriorating brain, to judge by his chess game. Dagnia was convinced that her twin brother was dying by degrees, and that without the requisite treatment it was only be a matter of time until he fell over dead at his piano. She still wouldn’t tell me why Dean wouldn’t speak to her, and in all the time I spent with Dean he hadn’t once mentioned that he even had a sister. I had begun quietly to suspect that I had fallen in with bad companions — the emotional and psychological equivalent of the Addams Family.